"It is all too easy for the president to dismiss fears of crime when he is surrounded by bodyguards and 24-hours surveillance," said the Democratic Alliance leader.

"Ordinary South Africans have to live with the grim reality and are tired of the government's denials and excuses."

Mr Mbeki said the government was not being given credit for fighting crime, with the murder rate now the lowest since the end of apartheid.

He said that crime was the kind of issue that many whites used to confirm their views that black people could not run the government.

"Crime in our country provides them with the most dramatic evidence of that decline, the evidence that they are right to foresee a hopeless future for our country, the proof that sooner or later things will fall apart," he said.

"The psychological residue of apartheid has produced a psychosis among some of us such that, to this day, they do not believe that our non-racial democracy will survive and succeed," he said.